Jerry Falwell Condemns the ERA, 1980

I believe that at the foundation of the women's liberation movement there is a mi­nority core of women who were once bored with life, whose real problems are spiri­tual problems. Many women have never accepted their God-given roles. They live in disobedience to God's laws and have promoted their godless philosophy through­out our society. God Almighty created men and women biologically different and with differing needs and roles. He made men and women to complement each other and to love each other. Not all the women involved in the feminist movement are radicals. Some are misinformed, and some are lonely women who like being house­wives and helpmeets and mothers, but whose husbands spend little time at home and who take no interest in their wives and children. Sometimes the full load of rearing a family becomes a great burden to a woman who is not supported by a man. Women who work should be respected and accorded dignity and equal rewards for equal work. But this is not what the present feminist movement and equal rights movement are all about.

The Equal Rights Amendment is a delusion. I believe that women deserve more than equal rights. And, in families and in nations where the Bible is believed, Christian women are honored above men. Only in places where the Bible is be lieved and practiced do women receive more than equal rights. Men and women have differing strengths. The Equal Rights Amendment can never do for women what needs to be done for them. Women need to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and be under His Lordship. They need a man who knows Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, and they need to be part of a home where their husband is a godly leader and where there is a Christian family.

The Equal Rights Amendment strikes at the foundation of our entire social structure. If passed, this amendment would accomplish exactly the opposite of its outward claims. By mandating an absolute equality under the law, it will actually take away many of the special rights women now enjoy. ERA is not merely a politi­cal issue, but a moral issue as well. A definite violation of holy Scripture, ERA de­fies the mandate that "the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church" (Ep. 5:23). In 1 Peter 3:7 we read that husbands are to give their wives honor as unto the weaker vessel, that they are both heirs together of the grace of life. Because a woman is weaker does not mean that she is less important.

Connaught C. Marshner Explains What Social Conservatives Really Want, 1988

By now everyone knows that pro-family conservatives are a powerful political force.... What follows are the presumptions of the moral traditionalists.

The family is the fundamental institution of society; in the traditional society, it was your main source of comfort and strength. When you were a child, your father geared his life to providing shelter for your mother and you. As you grew, your family imparted the skills of survival, and gave you your religion and your politics. In your old age, someone with a blood connection would offer you a bed and a seat by the fire.

Today, these functions have atrophied. Your existence needn't cause your fa­ther to change his lifestyle, and in many circles it changes your mother's as little as she can possibly arrange. It is no reason for your father to stay with your mother; in the modern myth, she may even be more "fulfilled" without him around. If they do stay together, they play an increasingly small role in your upbringing: the public­ education system, backed by the courts, positively puts obstacles in the path of par­ents wishing to exercise control over what their children read and study, while government-sponsored clinics are permitted to dispense contraceptives and perform abortions on teenagers without their parents' even being told. In your old age, Medicare will pay the costs of your medical treatment if you are put into an institu­tion, but not if your relatives care for you at home. It's likely that your children and their spouses will all have careers anyhow, which means they can hire someone to look after you but can't spend time with you themselves.

In one area after another, functions once performed by the family are now pro­vided by the government or government-style agencies and institutions. The goal of the pro-family movement is not to destroy these institutions but to restore to the family its proper functions, and to restore to the institutions an understanding of the proper proportion of their role.

The family fulfills many functions - social, psychological, and even economic - but these are not the reason for its existence. The family has one overriding task: raising children. It is each individual's entry point into society and the staging area of his personality.

Children are thus a gift and a responsibility, a long-term duty that arises from the nature of marriage. Marriage is not a contract, balancing conflicting interests, measuring competing obligations, forcing compliance with fear of consequences; it is a covenant, a permanent and exclusive union that sets no limits on what is to be given or forgiven by either party. The purposes of this covenant are the mutual sup­port of the partners and the procreation, education, and rearing of children. Human nature being what it is, in practice many marriages are more reminiscent of contract than of covenant. But public policy should not seek the lowest common denomina­tor and proclaim it as the model.

Modern society has, admittedly, lost sight of marriage in convenant terms. Fifty per cent of marriages in the U.S. today are second marriages for at least one of the partners. In 1984, over one million children were involved in the divorce of their parents; we can expect that over 11 million children - about one-fifth of the na­tion's total - will experience the misery of divorce over the next decade.

That trauma is rarely studied. In the famous California Children of Divorce Project, Dr. Judith Wallerstein of UC Berkeley followed children over a period of years after their parents divorced. Ten years after a divorce, 42 per cent of children were functioning poorly (exhibiting consistent depression, drug or alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, and/or poor performance in school); 15 per cent were function­ing unevenly; and only 43 per cent were doing well most of the time. And the de­cline in upward mobility is just beginning to be noted: Dr. Wallerstein found in one study that, although 41 per cent of their divorced fathers were professionals, only 27 per cent of the children had professional aspirations.

A further result of the contract approach is no-fault divorce, which regards chil­dren as options that can be adjudicated like cars and stereos, with no long-term con­sequence to anyone. Some women may feel their "sense of self-worth" enhanced by bearing the costs of child-rearing alone, but their babies have no such illusions of self-reliance. Thanks to divorce and illegitimacy, children are the poorest class in America today: 20.5 per cent of all children were below the poverty line in 1986.

Nor are children the only victims. Stanford professor Lenore Weitzman, in her landmark study, The Divorce Revolution, found that in the year after a divorce, women experience a 73 per cent decline in their standard of living, while their for mer husbands experience a 42 per cent increase. The typical liberal response to this is to lament the feminization of poverty and wonder what the Federal Government is going to do to force fathers to pay child support. But even if every father met every child-support payment, 97 per cent of divorced women with children would still be in poverty. The real problem, again, is state laws and judges that adhere to no-fault divorce, expecting divorced mothers to function like young professional men. Despite what many would like to believe, traits of gender and the condition of motherhood make a tremendous difference in the way people can and will act. Any world view that pretends otherwise is either dishonestly or maliciously inviting human misery.

Another distortion in the public consciousness is population-bomb rhetoric: the idea that there are too many of us. Couples contemplating parenthood frequently de­cide against it out of deference to a vague sense of "society's" need. But decisions about fertility are properly the responsibility of husband and wife - those who will bear the responsibility of raising the children. Outside pressure - whether public or private - is inappropriate.

Actually, if the long-term good of the nation were the controlling factor, large families ought to be the goal. We have come to expect in retirement a standard of living that formerly was the reward of those who had raised a large family of suc cessful and generous children. But maintaining Social Security and the rest of the welfare state requires constant population growth to keep the pyramid game going. The unfunded liability of our entitlement programs for the elderly alone is staggering. By the year 2010, two-thirds of the federal budget will be needed just to meet current entitlement promises.

The current tax cost of the welfare state is in fact making the future revenue base smaller, because it penalizes those who bear and raise children. Not only is there the loss of the second income and the expense of child-rearing, but mortgage' rates for decent homes are geared to two incomes. At best, a young couple must choose prosperity or children - and many don't even have that choice.

A perverse dynamic is in place in our society: youthful lust is indulged, so long-? as fertility is controlled. Later, when fertility is desired, many find that it has been destroyed. One in four American couples is infertile, report the Centers for Disease

Control, the most common cause being damage from venereal disease. And so be- I gins the shrill demand to have a baby. Just as it was a "right" to be infertile when I 18, it now is declared a "right" to be fertile at 28 or 35, as if nature could be turned; on and off to suit one's preferences.

The lengths gone to and the amounts of money spent in pursuit of pregnancy: can be astonishing. There is a growing demand for high-tech obstetrics - in vitro i fertilization, embryo transfer, and even more alarming techniques - to say nothing' of surrogate parenting. Let there be no confusion about this demand for babies, however: far too often, it is not a manifestation of pro-life sentiment, but of an ego: in pursuit of an alter.

If couples yearning for children but unable to conceive were satisfied by adop­tion, theirs would be a noble impulse. But adoption remains unfashionable, and' government policy does not encourage it. Federal funds are available to keep children in foster care, but not to place them in permanent homes, and some social. workers establish standards for adoption so high that if nature held to such standards, few of us would have been born.

It should be an achievable goal that every baby born have an adult male respon­sible for it, that the norm be children nurtured by their own, married parents. But support for the traditional family flies in the face of the reigning orthodoxy by hinting that there is something inherently superior in children's being raised by their; own parents in an intact family. Many professional women, single parents, and' human-services personnel seem to take this praise of the ideal as an insult to the 1₁ good they do. Many single parents are doing an excellent job of raising their children. But should we pretend that divorce and unwed motherhood are symptoms of social strength?         '

Liberalism since the Sixties has repudiated the validity of the ideal, anxious to' placate feminism and the demand for instant pleasure without negative conse­quences. The facts of human nature do not change, however: to develop into stable,' virtuous men and women, children need the constant, loving, particular attention of one or two consistent adults.

If we are to reassert the ideal, we must re-examine employment policies that, lure mothers into the workforce, change tax policies that favor working mothers;' over full-time homemakers, and create tax oases for families of young children Technology can come to our aid here, if it is not trammeled by politics as it has: been in previous opportunities. Thirteen million new jobs could be created at home (presumably mostly for women) if government resists pressure from organized labor to outlaw home employment. Local laws restricting businesses operated out of the home - including computer work - must be corrected.

For those unmoved by social and moral arguments, there are hard dollars-and­-cents considerations. If children are given the right formation they become a net plus to the public treasury; if not, they end up as a drain on it. According to University of North Carolina sociologist Peter Uhlenberg, there were in 1976 more than 260 programs administered by twenty different agencies of the Federal Government whose primary mission was to benefit children and adolescents, from recreation programs to drug and alcohol rehabilitation, job training, delinquency prevention, juvenile justice services, nutrition guidance, and so on. Real per-capita social ­welfare expenditures in the country increased about five-fold between 1960 and 1980, with youth programs keeping pace. The government was doing more and more, and families were doing less and less. But did the well-being of the "benefi­ciaries" increase?

Among white adolescents aged 15 to 19, Uhlenberg found that, between 1960 and 1980, the death rate from suicide increased 140 per cent; from homicide, 232 per cent. The gonorrhea morbidity rate increased 199 per cent. Just between 1972 and 1979, the proportion of children aged 12 to 17 using alcohol increased 56 per cent; using drugs, 139 per cent. From 1970 to 1980, the arrest rate in that age group for violent crimes increased 60 per cent. This is the future we buy with our "investments."

It all comes down to values. Traditional values work because they are the guidelines most consistent with human nature for producing happiness and achieve­ment. Children who are not trained to traditional values are deprived of the best opportunity to understand their own nature and achieve that happiness. Children who are trained to these values are nonetheless free, upon maturity, to reject them: that is why, contrary to what the relativists insist, instilling them is not oppressive. But if these values are at least transmitted to all members of society, the possibility for a fundamental consensus on behavior exists.

Ronald Reagan got elected and reelected in large part because enough people agreed that the policies of the welfare state had failed, and enough wanted to hear more about traditional values. The public wanted government to shrink its role in their lives. That basic impulse has been developed for eight years now. In the mean­time, we still have a welfare state that shows no signs of curing a single social ill, let alone withering away - it is, of course, intrinsically incapable of doing either.... This system perpetuates itself and the problems it pretends to solve; and yet we can­not follow the vision on which Ronald Reagan was elected until the way society or­ganizes its approach to problems is changed - until people are again in charge of their own affairs, and those of their local community.

What can we do? An example comes from Texas. Jimmy Starkes runs the Dal­las Life Foundation, a shelter for the homeless. It houses one thousand people, with over two hundred volunteers and fewer than fifty employees, many of both groups themselves former street people. Starkes estimates that out of every ten homeless people who come through his system, eight are employed and productive when he stops following them, whereas only one out of ten who go through a public shelter would have such a future. In 1987, Starkes raised $2 million in cash and in kind from the Dallas community to do this work - from people who are also paying taxes so government can do its ineffective work on the same mission.

Here is the answer: transfer, one by one, the functions of the welfare state from bureaucrats, whose vested interest is perpetuation of the problem, to service­ oriented people whose only interest is solution of the problem in its current victims, and prevention of it in its future victims.

Sure, Jimmy Starkes gets the people he helps to commit their lives to Christ. Liberals would say that's unconstitutional; some conservatives would feel it's not fair. But Starkes would tell you that unless they do that first, he can't help them, be cause they're not willing to let him help them change their lives. Welfare agencies don't demand that change of heart, nor do they have Jimmy Starkes' low recidi­vism rate.

Liberal solutions don't work because institutions cannot change hearts or minds. People do that. That's why the family must hold onto as many functions as it can, and reclaim those that have been taken from it: because the consolidation of tasks in the family intensifies the interaction among members, and heightens aware­ness of and commitment to one another's welfare. That gives the long-range focus to our lives that connects us to society and enables us to extend our concern to our fellow citizens.

"Private-sector initiatives" is a fine watchword, but if it just means business voluntarily giving money to government-style programs, it is no solution to social problems. If it means empowering ancient institutions to do that which they do best, namely catalyze change in human hearts and actions, then it can invite a solution.